Bio

Brad Hostetler is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Kenyon College. He specializes in the material culture of the Eastern Mediterranean, specifically the art and architecture of the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic Caliphate. His primary research interests include the interaction of text and image, patronage of devotional art, and the agency of luxury objects in late antique and medieval societies. His current book project examines reliquaries in the Middle Byzantine period (843–1204), a time when Constantinople was regarded as the relic capital of the Christian world. He is also co-director of Inscriptions of Mount Athos, a project documenting the medieval Greek inscriptions on minor works of art preserved in the monastic collections of Mount Athos, Greece. He has published essays in Eastern Christian Art, Athanor, and most recently in Natural Materials of the Holy Land and the Visual Translation of Place, 500 – 1500 (Routledge, 2017). He has held fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, D.C., and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Prior to Kenyon, Brad taught courses on Medieval Pilgrimage, the True Cross, and Late Antique and Early Christian Art and Architecture at Florida State University. His work and CV can be found on Academia and Humanities Commons.